It's 10.30pm on Saturday night and I'm suddenly struck by a remarkable statistic. Given that Prince came on stage for the second of his Hit and Run Manchester Academy concerts sometime just after 8pm and returned after a short break an hour later, by 10.30 Prince's encores alone have already lasted longer than a football match. And wait, the lights are still on, those giant artificial fires onstage are still flickering, there's a distinctive head of hair visible in the darkness … Yes, here he comes again. By the 11pm curfew, Prince and his fantastic new female band 3EDEYEGIRL have been onstage in this 2,600-capacity venue for seconds under three hours, and yet he looks and sounds for all the world as if he's just getting started.

I've never been one of those Prince superfans who collect Argentinian 7"s of obscure tracks or write squiggly symbols on their faces, but I am a fan. My first Prince album was a pre-recorded cassette of the 1987 magnum opus Sign O' The Times, which came as one of the three free albums you could choose from a mail order music company on signing to their service. This inevitably led to a voyage of discovery. A friend taped me Parade. I got other albums from the mail order company – not insignificantly, everything up to and including Lovesexy, after which his songwriting gifts first wavered. I've never seen him live, but have long heard testimonies of friends who compared the experience of seeing Prince in the flesh to a road-to-Damascus moment, seeing a musical God, or Bruce Springsteen. Everything they always said was true.

The gig feels different from the off. The Academy exterior glows in eerie purple. Unlike the Friday night there are queues around the block and the kind of anticipation that has made people dress up as if they're on a date. When I walk in, he's just taken the stage to an interminable, very 80s-sounding funk jam which proves to be the calm before the storm. "That was then, this is now," he yells. "We're going to have a party." And he's off – on the kind of blistering, back catalogue soaking marathon that can dispense with the twin Sign O' The Times colossi of the nakedly funky, social commentating title track and the raw sexual electro of Hot Thing inside the first 30 or so minutes.

The atmosphere is indeed like a giant, sardine-packed sweaty party, despite our host spending at least half the night in darkness. Even when the lights are on, he is backlit so much that for a fleeting moment the thought crosses my mind that this might not be our Prince at all, that people have paid upwards of £70 for a supreme impersonator, but that voice – that velvet falsetto, and the trademark shriek in a crowd-sung Purple Rain – is unmistakable.

I think of Prince as a master showman but here, clad in subdued black, he's Prince the consummate bandleader, lithe at 57 and rushing around the stage from instrument to instrument, conducting his musicians, the lighting engineers and the audience like we're all part of his grand plan. When he hauls people up to dance with him after around 40 minutes, it feels like a climax. But there are two hours and 20 minutes left to rampage from a slowed, smouldering I Could Never Take The Place of Your Man to a storming Take Me With U and tell us – as he probably tells another city on another night – that "Manchester feels like my home."

Everyone will have their fantasy Prince setlist and mine would include the spiritual The Cross, the party-riotous 1999 and the lewdly fascinating Darling Nikki, but it's hard to quibble with a hurtle from When Doves Cry to Alphabet Street to Raspberry Berry to a delicate, fragile Sometimes It Snows In April, titan to titan. He is still a cross between James Brown, George Clinton, Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix, but Housequake literally shakes the building's foundations with sub bass and he plays blistering heavy metal better than almost any blistering heavy metal band I've ever seen. Every time the house lights go up, nobody moves a muscle. They just stand firm and clap and scream. And here he is again! And again! And he's donned a Sly Stone panama hat and is doing Nothing Compares 2U and some people are being carried out while others are muttering tearfully about a "once in a lifetime experience".

Maybe it's true that Hit And Run is designed to generate PR and a money-spinning festival booking to help his reported financial troubles, and if there is a an elephant on the room it's that most those classics were written more than 20 years ago. But at 11pm, when he holds his guitar above his head and declares "We're the best and so are you," he has given everyone present a night they won't forget.